Larry's Kidney: Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China with My Black Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant--and Save His Life

by Daniel Asa Rose

  The service begins. I take my seat dead center, and a guy who looks like he could be named Izzy enters the room to take a seat behind me. We give each other the thumbs-up. It’s an energetic ceremony, full of the bellowing of songs and waving of arms to welcome in the Sabbath. The tunes are ones a child might make up in a playground by himself: simple and flowing. The rabbi is an enthusiastic twenty-something woman in Birkenstocks, cracking wise. I find myself thinking that she’s an example of someone who should be a little less comfortable with public speaking, but then decide that’s an uncharitable thought, the result of my being the product of a combative academy myself.

  I relax and let my mind wander. Why do I find myself so comfortable in this setting? Maybe it’s because for the better part of a week I’ve been charmed by the Chinese, who seem not so dissimilar to Jews. Think of the areas both specialize in: education, business, and family—not necessarily in that order. Also food. Don’t Jews repair to Chinese restaurants on Christmas, when they’re in need of emotional comfort? Haven’t I noticed that the traditional Chinese moon-cake pastry comes in flavors like those of hamantaschen? Also both subsets have been victims of the same prejudice through the ages: that they’re gawky, bumbling, industrious—the nerds of their respective continents, who in reality have proved themselves capable of some of the most nerdless feats on earth. Also they both share some basic ideas of life and death, such as the belief that the physical body should stay intact after death, barring the removal of organs. Which, come to think of it, doesn’t bode well for my getting a kidney.

  On the plus side, however, is an anachronism they share that may just work in my favor. These, after all, are two of the oldest cultures on the planet, still holding fast to certain values they’ve upheld since time immemorial. In this cutting-edge city in this postmodern world, I happen to be sitting in one of those pockets where things operate the way they did four thousand years ago: through personal relationships. Seated here, I’m at the intersection point of two ancient tight-knit systems, where Chinese guanxi meets Jewish guanxi. Could I tap into that somehow to get Larry what he needs?

  Not only that, but as I look around at all these brilliant faces, it occurs to me that these are some of the best-connected people in Asia. Could I just stand up and make an appeal right here and now? For inspiration I recall my old college roommate who was enterprising enough to bed Janis Joplin the night she toured campus and used the same spirit years later when he found himself traveling through a faraway city with all the hotels booked up. How’d he find a place to sleep? After leafing through a list of evening events in the local paper, he went to an AA meeting and said, “I’m new to town, can anyone put me up?” That girlfriend lasted six months.

  I let the idea simmer while my mind wanders some more. The ark is a red and yellow porcelain credenza in which the Torah sits wrapped in…a bungee cord? I can’t quite make it out from where I’m sitting. People are tapping their feet to these infectious, primitive rhythms. The banker from London, the history professor from Rome, all these high-octane overachievers from the most sophisticated corners of the globe are tapping their toes. My ears perk up at one of the rabbi’s remarks: “We have a sub-minyan of lawyers here tonight, so if anyone is in need of expert legal advice…” Okay, good, they’re a giving group. But will they lend a hand? There’s a moment to introduce all the children in attendance: Rebecca, Ben, Joshua, Eleena. There’s a prayer to ask healing for anyone of our acquaintance who’s ill. Several hands pop up around the room, tossing out names to be included. “For Larry Feldman,” I say, using my best voice so they’re disposed to hear more from me. Okay, hat’s in the ring. But now what?

  As the service proceeds, I skim along the text and find myself feeling sorry for God. If He exists, as I happen to believe, does He really want to keep being called all-powerful, ever-righteous, Sovereign and Sustaining Ruler, blah blah blah? After all these eons, He must be so divinely fed up with all that fawning. Put yourself in God’s shoes. If you were Him, wouldn’t you want it spiced up once in a while? We’re boring Him to death! Here’s the praise I’d want to hear, so here’s the praise I put silently forth from my innermost being:

  Cool God! O Cool One beyond compare. Blessed be Thou for tossing us a holy bone! You got Larry and me safely to China. We’re on the hunt! We’re getting closer! O Hipper than Anyone God, Most Happening Dude by far, help me help Larry even more. Give me the goods to enhance my cunning, I pray. If You could guide me as to how to play this group so I can save my cousin, that will be cool beyond counting! Thanks unto Thee for showing me the way, O Coolest God of the cosmos, for revealing unto me my opening and giving me my shot…right about now…anytime You think it’s right….

  “You there, in the very fetching panama,” the rabbi says.

  “Me?” I say, finding myself on my feet. “Oh, yeah, the panama. I figured it would serve as a yarmulke tonight,” I say.

  “It works. Is that a silk band?” the rabbi asks.

  “I doubt it. I picked it up on the street in Ecuador for eight bucks.”

  “Ecuador? For a panama?”

  “Little-known fact: Most panamas come from Ecuador,” I say as the intelligent heads nod in receipt of a new fact. How my people love new facts! Information! Data! While they’re taking this in, I scramble to collect myself.

  “So you’re standing,” the rabbi observes neutrally. “Does this mean you have a general announcement to make?”

  Cool God, here goes nothing, I think, turning to shrug an apology to Izzy in case this backfires. I clear my throat. “Shabbat shalom, everyone,” I say. “I’m Daniel from Massachusetts. I apologize in advance if this isn’t the proper place to say this or if I’m abusing your hospitality, but I’ll just be direct: I’m in Beijing on a mission of mercy. My cousin Larry, whom I referenced before, is dying of end-stage renal disease and I’ve come to Beijing with him to look for a kidney. I realize it’s a controversial subject, and the last thing I want is to offend anyone, but we can’t afford to dillydally. We’ve had no luck all week and are about to give up on China and leave for Manila in two days, so time is of the essence. If anyone has even a faint lead on how to find a healthy kidney, it would be a mitzvah if you would share it with me after the service.”

  No one reacts as I sit back down in silence. A deep blush starts in my chest and speeds upward to my scalp. How gauche I am, barging right in and doubtless breaking all kinds of protocol. I’ve probably embarrassed my host, Izzy, half to death. I don’t dare turn around to see the discomfort I’ve caused. Cool God, ouch—sorry me so pushy!

  The ceremony breaks up shortly afterward, and I’m left alone with my blush burning the tips of my ears. People hurriedly depart to the right and left of me. I turn around slowly to face Izzy, but he’s split for a buffet table at the back of the room. Maybe I ought to just liquefy myself and dribble down a drain somewhere….

  The pretty journalist from New York approaches me.

  “Sorry if I overstepped,” I say.

  “Hey, ‘chutzpah’ is a Jewish word,” she assures me.

  “Yeah, but didn’t I just alienate everyone in the room?”

  “They’re still processing,” she says…and sure enough, little by little, members start drifting over.

  “So how’s your brother doing?” one of them asks.

  “He’s my cousin, and he’s dying,” I say.

  “I have an uncle who’s a pulmonary surgeon,” someone else volunteers, “who came here a few years ago to perform a lung transplant.”

  “Close but no cigar,” I say, getting my confidence back. “I hear lungs but no kidney. Do I hear a kidney,” I ask, like an auctioneer, the tips of my ears still burning. “Kidney going once, kidney going twice…”

  Just then a leopard scarf slides by behind me, close enough to brush my shirt. “Talk to me when you get a chance,” the Australian accent says.

  Ten minutes later Antonia is giving me her business card and telling me she’ll try to call me tomo
rrow. Of course the transplantation of organs to Westerners is illegal and her company would never put itself in a position to help me directly, she says, but perhaps she can make a few discreet calls on my cousin’s behalf.

  “It is illegal, for sure? That’s one of the points we’ve been unclear about.”

  “Because the law is more fluid in China than you’re used to at home, it’s not as black and white,” she says, “and it’s frequently tailored to meet local conditions. But yes, it is indeed illegal, since they passed a Restriction a while back. Apparently the feeling was that the West was making such a fuss about China’s transplant business—questioning whether organs came from political dissidents or religious radicals—that China said, ‘All right, then, you can’t have any.’ And that was that. But here people don’t have the same general attitude against it that there is in the West. It’s not frowned upon ethically the way it is in much of your United States.”

  “Well, I’m suspending all ethical considerations because he’s my cousin.”

  Antonia comprehends this implicitly. “Those considerations are fine until it’s your flesh and blood, isn’t that right?” she says. “So Izzy tells me you’re a writer. What sort?”

  “I write about my life and the things I see happening around me. You could call me an investigative memoirist, I guess.”

  “I’ll be frank: I’m asking because that concerns me. You’re not going to give away any secrets, are you? You could get a lot of people in trouble….”

  “No, ma’am, I won’t,” I say.

  She looks me over. “Give me my card back.”

  Is she rescinding her offer because she doesn’t trust me? But no, she only wants to add her cell number.

  “Tomorrow,” she says. “But no promises.”

  We hug and part.

  Suddenly finding myself superfluous in the room, I try to locate Izzy to say good-bye, but he seems to be successfully avoiding me. Just as I’m at the exit ready to slip unnoticed down the stairs, the dean with the bow tie appears—Alfred somebody—tucking his business card into my breast pocket and telling me to keep in touch.

  “I like what your cousin’s nurses said,” he says. “Did they really wish him well?”

  I nod. “There aren’t any bad guys in this drama,” I say. “People may go about things differently, but everyone wants what’s for the best.”

  He snorts appreciatively, passing me something under his arm like contraband: the black yarmulke with gold Chinese letters. “A little keepsake from one of the guys,” he says out of the corner of his mouth, as though we’re performing an undercover act. “He says to say you earned it.”

  An hour later I find Larry in the lobby of his hotel, regaling the Robert Palmer quints, who are spellbound by the unstoppable flood of Larry talk in a tongue they don’t speak. “On the other hand, you may be too young to have heard the name Shaquille O’Neal, all those greats,” he’s saying. “What are you, seventeen years old? Seventeen is good in China, I can see you’re responsible citizens. Where I come from, seventeen is the worst. Let me give you an example. I had a friend whose daughter was seventeen. Name of Angela, I called her Angina. My friend asked Angina, theoretically, if she had a classmate in a wheelchair, would she be willing to be friends with her. Angina thought for a minute. ‘Sure,’ she said, ‘because I’m so popular it wouldn’t hurt me a bit.’”

  “Sorry to interrupt, ladies,” I say, pulling Larry aside. They seem disappointed as I escort their star performer to the other side of the room and give him the good news about Antonia and her connections. Larry’s visibly unimpressed—after a lifetime of disappointments, he’s learned to keep his emotions monochromatic—but does allow how excited he is that Mary has hand-washed his socks for him again while I was gone.

  “By the way,” he says, “just FYI: I don’t do sunscreen, like you mentioned before you left. I consider it sissyish. Please don’t embarrass me like that in front of Mary again. I’m a big boy.”

  I look him over. “That may be what you are most of the time,” I say, “but what you are the rest of the time, Commissioner, is a pain in the ass.”

  Larry considers this. “That’s probably an accurate assessment,” he says.

  CHAPTER 7

  Good Luck, We Trick You

  One cannot refuse to eat just because there is a chance of being choked.

  Next morning, fuck market. I figure I can cheer up Larry if I grab him a Cartier knockoff for five bucks that would cost someone five grand on South Beach. Outside the hotel Jade comes hopping up to me waving both hands. I almost don’t recognize her in jeans and blouse instead of her olive drab uniform. “Excuse me, Eighty-four, but this moment the staff comes out,” she explains as she pulls me down the street away from the hotel entrance.

  “Oh, that’s right, Twenty-four, you’re moonlighting on the sly?”

  “Double agent, license to kill,” she snickers. “Martini shaken, not stirred.”

  I love that she can make fun of all the spying silliness. Situation splendid.

  “Heat so hot you shirt is wet already,” she notes. “You are very schvitz.”

  “It’s hot, all right. Where’d you pick up the slang?”

  “I jabber on Internet so make this day worthwhile for you.”

  The market, when we get there, respires the electrifying odor of garlic and incense. We are jostled by local vendors with beaten-up toenails and Westerners whose toenails look as if they’ve never done an honest day’s work in their lives. Merchants and customers alike use finger symbols to signify numbers, a kind of bartering sign language I don’t remember from last time I was here. It’s pleasant to be under the wing of my young protector. “Be wary of pickypocks,” Jade warns, and she shows me how to discern between antiques that are genuinely old and those manufactured two weeks ago. She scratches the surface of an ancient-seeming jewelry box where particles of sand have been glued to make it seem as weathered as something from the Ming dynasty, and sure enough there’s a shiny staple underneath. I’m impressed: The art of instant Minging manifests an ingenuity that’s almost worth the price. But Jade is embarrassed about her countrymen’s duplicity.

  “Don’t worry, we have fibbing in our country, too,” I assure her. “We even have our own finger gesture to symbolize it.” I demonstrate crossed fingers. “It means the person is faking.”

  Jade is confused—she thought crossed fingers meant hoping for good luck. I’ve never thought of it before, but I tell her that the gesture actually means both—faking and hoping. What an odd combination. Jade crosses her thin fingers. “Good luck, I trick you,” she says, grasping the double concept right away.

  I don’t actually mind losing money at this sort of bazaar, because there’s some justice in having Westerners spread the wealth like this—paying a few extra dollars for an imitation Cartier helps make up for the ways we’ve always exploited the Chinese, sort of individualized reparations. But Jade seems determined to get me my money’s worth. At a stall with yellowing, chipped animal bones, I eye an eagle skull with a black beak. Jade confirms that the dried cartilage is real. But what’s this other beauty?

  “Walf. Small walf,” Jade says. “Not find this on Canal Street!”

  She decides I’ll never fully grasp the Chinese soul until I own a small Chinese wolf skull, and to negotiate with the vendor she uses a range of lovely sounds my brain scrambles helplessly to make sense of. “Boozy boozy Negev Desert!” she scolds with finger upraised. “Who has chiggers?

  She! She! She!” she laughs, putting her hand on his forearm as they chortle together, all part of a prescribed game. She cajoles most artfully, tugging on his sleeve, swinging her hips coquettishly, calling him uncle— and periodically accusing him of trying to pass counterfeit bills. “But not too crispy to travel?” she asks me after winning the sale for two dollars. It’s just coming to me that she means “brittle” when my cell phone rings.

  “What’d you lose now?” I ask, but it’s not Larry—it’s the
Australian accent of Antonia, telling me she reached someone, something, somewhere…?

  “Listen, Antonia, there’s a crowd around me, can you hold on while I go someplace that’s quieter?”

  But there is no quiet place in the market. Jade leads me to the back of a booth away from the main foot traffic, yet even here my English attracts a small crowd, including three schoolboys with their arms affectionately around one another’s necks. While I cover my ears from the ambient noise, Antonia tells me she’s learned that kidney transplants have indeed been drastically reduced because of the Restriction, but that if I can promise confidentiality, there’s a surgeon out in the city of Shi a few hours west of Beijing who may still have access to some.

  “How can he skirt the law? Will it be a healthy organ?”

  “My understanding is that this Dr. X is so highly placed, if he wants an organ—which will be immaculately screened—he knows how to make the authorities look the other way. But time is of the essence. If you can get there by this evening, he’ll be able to meet you. Don’t fool around with trains; just take a taxi and go. The fare will cost maybe eight or nine hundred RMBs—less than two hundred dollars.”

  “Is it safe?”

  “Safe?”

  “I mean, if they catch us, will they lock us up to make an example?”

  “I know what ‘safe’ means, I’m just framing my answer,” Antonia replies. There’s the wail of a siren from her end as a police car hurtles by. “I can’t say anything for sure,” she informs me after it passes. “Nothing is guaranteed. But I’ll tell you that if I were desperate to save a family member, this is the place I would go.”

  That does it for me. I agree to run it by Larry and, if he’s good to go, to get started immediately.

  “When you can commit a hundred percent to getting out there today, call me back and I’ll confirm with my contact,” Antonia says. “I have an hour and a half before my flight.”